The Special Family Meaning Behind Riley Keough's Daughter's Name
Elvis Presley's granddaughter has not had an easy life. Indeed, Riley Keough's childhood wasn't as glamorous as you might think — far from it. The "Daisy Jones & the Six" star has had to deal with a great deal of sadness and heartbreak: from watching her parents, Lisa Marie Presley and Danny Keough, divorce when she was only 5 years old, to dealing with anxiety and losing her beloved brother, Benjamin Keough, to suicide in 2020. Her sibling's death hit her particularly hard and, as she told The New York Times in 2021, "The first four or five months, I couldn't get out of bed." Even speaking was difficult and while she eventually began to push her way past the grief, she was still struggling. She dubbed the time since Benjamin's death "a year of feeling like I was thrown into the ocean and couldn't swim." In 2022, she admitted on Instagram he was still an integral part of her life, writing, "Not an hour goes by where I don't think of you and miss you."
The pair shared such a tight bond that when Riley (secretly) started her own family in 2022, she honored her late brother when naming her firstborn child. And despite making headlines due to her reportedly fractured relationship with grandmother Priscilla Presley following Lisa Marie's 2023 death, she also paid homage to the Presley side of her family.
Here's the special family meaning behind Riley Keough's daughter's name, as well as everything we know about her so far.
Riley Keough's daughter has a truly sentimental name
Riley Keough tied the knot with Australian stuntman Ben Smith-Petersen in 2015 and, in September 2023, she confirmed to Vanity Fair that they had quietly become parents. Spilling major details about her first child as part of her cover story, Keough introduced daughter Tupelo Storm Smith-Petersen to the world and revealed the sweet family tribute hidden behind each of her names. While her first name is a nod to Elvis' birthplace — Tupelo, Mississippi — her middle name is a tribute to her brother, whose full name was Benjamin Storm. "We were very connected and very similar," Keough explained. "He was much quicker and wittier and a little smarter than me."
However, despite its sentimental backstory, it seems Keough was initially hoping to keep her name's meaning under wraps. As she told the mag, she chose her daughter's moniker before the release of "Elvis" and once the movie came out, her plans were foiled. "I was like, 'This is great because it's not really a well-known word or name in relation to my family — it's not like Memphis or something," she recalled. "Then, when the 'Elvis' movie came out, it was like, 'Tupelo this and Tupelo that.' I was like, 'Oh, no!'"
As for her little one's looks, the actor teased, "She's literally like someone shrunk my husband and that's our baby."
Everything we know about Riley Keough's daughter
Riley Keough initially kept mum about her daughter's name, as well as her very existence. As a source told Us Weekly, "Riley wanted to keep the birth of her daughter private because her and her entire family is so public in every other way." However, her plans unexpectedly changed when she had to pen a eulogy for her mother, Lisa Marie Presley, in January 2023. Because she was too emotional to read it herself, her husband, Ben Smith-Petersen, read it on her behalf and surprised everyone by revealing they had secretly become parents. "I hope I can love my daughter the way you loved me, the way you loved my brother and my sisters," Keough wrote, per People. That March, she confirmed the news, teasing Interview, "Do you want the exclusive? It's going to go viral!" The big surprise? "I became a mother in 2022."
Keough hasn't revealed much about her daughter since, but she did tell Vanity Fair in September 2023 that baby Tupelo was actually born via surrogate back in August 2022. "I think it's a very cool, selfless, and incredible act that these women do to help other people," she mused. "I can carry children, but it felt like the best choice for what I had going on physically with the autoimmune stuff." As Keough explained, she was worried about the potential risks related to her having Lyme disease which, per Mayo Clinic, can lead to a host of serious symptoms, including muscle weakness, arthritis, and numbness.